El Paso

El Paso is a city in and the county seat of El Paso County, Texas. In 1659, the Spanish founded El Paso del Norte (now Ciudad Juarez, Mexico) along the Rio Grande, and, in 1680, the small village of El Paso was built on the north bank of the river and served as the temporarily capital of New Mexico during the Pueblo Revolt. American settlers began to arrive in the region during the 1820s, and, even after the Texas Revolution (which did not involve El Paso), American immigrants continued to arrive. In 1848, El Paso and the rest of Texas north of the Rio Grande were ceded to the United States at the end of the Mexican-American War, and El Paso was taken from New Mexico and placed in the new state of Texas as part of the Compromise of 1850. In 1862, El Paso was captured by Californian Union troops at the start of the American Civil War, and El Paso was incorporated in 1873. During the 1870s, El Paso was inhabited by only 23 whites and 150 Hispanics, but its population boomed to 10,000 in 1891 due to the construction of two railroads in 1881. El Paso became a wild and violent boomtown known as the "Six Shooter Capital" because of its lawlessness, but, during World War I, the US Army cracked down on the vices in the city and transformed it into a premier manufacturing, transportation, and retail hub of the American Southwest. During the 1910s, the Mexican Revolution brought waves of Mexican refugees to the city, but, in 1917, 300 Mexicans and 21 whites were killed in racial violence resulting from a failed Mexican revolutionary attempt to retake El Paso for Mexico. By 1920, whites were again the majority in the city due to Texan and American migration, and the city was segregated between the two races. From 1942 to 1956, the bracero program brought more Mexicans to the city, and they were again a majority by 1965. During the 1960s, the city grew in size as it annexed surrounding neighborhoods. In 2018, El Paso had a population of 682,669 people, and its metro area had 845,553 residents.